Rhetorical techniques in the news, October 20, 2026
9 articles, drawn evenly from
outlets rated left, center, and right. Each one lists the rhetorical techniques
our model found — not a judgment of whether it's true.
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⚠️ This day is not evenly balanced:
left 4, center 1, right 4.
We had fewer articles available from
center-rated
outlets than from the others — usually because their feeds had already
rotated the day's stories out by the time we built this page.
CNN reportedly revised its Doha forum agenda to remove glowing descriptions of Qatar, per Eitan Fischberger's posts on X.
The Washington Free Beacon runs a lighthearted Q&A with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Michigan.
Records reviewed by The Intercept show Rogers's Senate campaign spent over $100,000 on luxury travel last quarter, mostly private jets.
A White House correspondent revisits Mar-a-Lago a decade after covering Trump's 2016 Florida primary victory there.
Trump announced East Potomac Golf Links in Washington will close next month to become a single professional-caliber course.
Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers attacked Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed at a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity.
Trump told a Kansas rally France was 'conquered, looted, and burned' by migrants, jihadists and communists, urging voters to look at it.
Six Democratic senators urged HHS Secretary Kennedy to rescind a policy letting HHS lawyers represent unaccompanied migrant children.
Former Marine Cruz Marquis says he was held in a "penal platoon" after refusing the COVID vaccine.
← Previous day (2026-10-19)
How these articles were chosen
- Sources are a fixed, version-controlled list of outlets, not picked per day.
- Equal numbers are taken from left-, center-, and
right-rated outlets, using the
AllSides
media bias ratings — those labels are theirs, not ours.
- Within an outlet we take the most recent articles from its politics or world
section feed. No human picks the interesting ones.
- Live blogs, podcasts, video and photo galleries are skipped — they contain
too little text to analyze.
The full source list
Ratings below are AllSides' own labels
(retrieved 2026-09-09),
not ours. We group Left and Lean Left together, and
Lean Right and Right together, which balances direction
but not intensity — the exact ratings are here so you can judge that yourself.
- Left:
The Guardian (US) (Left),
NPR (Lean Left),
Vox (Left),
Mother Jones (Left),
The Guardian Tech (Left),
Guardian Science (Left),
NPR Business (Lean Left),
NPR Technology (Lean Left),
Guardian Opinion (Left),
Mother Jones Environment (Left),
HuffPost (Left),
Slate (Left),
The Intercept (Left),
The Nation (Left),
Salon (Left),
The New Republic (Left),
Common Dreams (Left),
The Daily Beast (Left),
The Atlantic (Left),
Politico (Lean Left),
ABC News (Lean Left),
CBS News (Lean Left),
NBC News (Lean Left),
Al Jazeera (Lean Left),
Axios (Lean Left),
PBS NewsHour (Lean Left),
Semafor (Lean Left)
- Center:
BBC News (Center),
Christian Science Monitor (Center),
The Hill (Center),
UPI (Center),
Reason (Center),
Ars Technica (Center),
BBC Business (Center),
CSM Environment (Center),
Reason — Volokh Conspiracy (Center),
Christian Science Monitor Commentary (Center),
UPI Voices (Center),
Bloomberg (Center),
Straight Arrow News (Center),
NewsNation (Center),
Deutsche Welle (Center)
- Right:
Fox News (Right),
New York Post (Right),
Washington Examiner (Lean Right),
New York Post Business (Right),
Fox Tech (Right),
Washington Examiner Opinion (Lean Right),
New York Post Tech (Right),
Washington Examiner Business (Lean Right),
New York Post Opinion (Right),
Washington Times (Lean Right),
National Review (Lean Right),
The Federalist (Right),
The Daily Wire (Right),
The Daily Caller (Right),
Washington Free Beacon (Right),
Breitbart (Right),
TheBlaze (Right),
Just the News (Lean Right),
RedState (Right)
Who owns each outlet, and every article we've analyzed from it: the outlets.
Limitations worth knowing
- Semblen detects rhetorical techniques, not left/right tilt.
- The model has known false positives on strong-but-legitimate
language — particularly military reporting and opinion writing in the
author's own voice.
- We list the techniques found. A technique flag is not a
claim that an article is false, and we don't rank outlets against each other.
- Articles where the model found nothing are not published — there'd be
nothing on the page.
- Each article is analyzed once, at the time shown on its page. Outlets
sometimes update articles after publication, so a
quoted phrase may no longer appear in the current version.
- Findings may include language an outlet is quoting rather than
asserting — a politician's attack line, or an opponent's own words.
We flag technique wherever it appears, including inside quotations.
- We link to each original article and quote only short phrases as evidence.